Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy

Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy
Amazon

Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy describes what the Vatican did–or did not do–to help Jews in Italy in World War II. Author Susan Zuccotti, who has written two other books about the Holocaust, demonstrates that little help of any kind came from Popes Pius XI and XII or their […]

Trilobite!

Trilobite!
Amazon

Subtitled: Eyewitness to Evolution With his new book Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution, Richard Fortey confirms his status as one of the best communicators of science around today. His hugely enjoyable previous book, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, was shortlisted for the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc science book prize, […]

Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods
Amazon

In Treatise On The Gods, Mencken takes on the history of religion from pre-history to the practice of Christianity in his own day. First published in 1930 (and revised in 1946), this book generated more controversy than any of his other books, but surprised some of Mencken’s most bitter critics with its genuine scholarship, sober […]

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Amazon

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captivated the imagination of […]

Towing Jehovah

Towing Jehovah
Amazon

God is dead. “Died and fell into the sea. ” That’s what Raphael, a despondent angel with luminous white wings and a blinking halo, tells Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday. Soon Van Horne is chared with captaining the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long corpse […]

Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism

Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism
Amazon

The face of creationism has been through some major plastic surgery in the past decade or so. The leading proponents of “intelligent design theory” have left the ranting flat-earth types behind and found respected positions in the academic world from which to launch attacks on mainstream science. Philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock has explored […]

Toward a Genuine Spirituality: A Human Strategy

Toward a Genuine Spirituality: A Human Strategy
Amazon

This book attempts to guide people of all religious and nonreligious persuasions toward a genuine humanistic spirituality. The author writes, “Perhaps this is the soft underbelly of a book exposed to the modern world: to say that one can be happier and more valuable without a ‘beyond’ … that one can not only learn to […]

Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society

Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society
Amazon

For those who have felt that other memetics sources were just teasers, your 20 year wait is over! Written by a scientist who independently discovered memetics when the field was less than 10% its present age, Thought Contagion explains movements ranging from Amish to Nazi, sexually transmitted beliefs to apocalyptic religion. The book earns advance […]

Thomas Jefferson’s Freethought Legacy

Thomas Jefferson’s Freethought Legacy
Amazon

This delightful collection of quotes from Jefferson establishes beyond dispute his enormous contributions to rationalism, freethought, and science. Often, what historians (and especially politicians) have done is to select those quotes that reflect conventional religiosity and beliefs. Here great care has been taken to exclude those quotes and to present, instead, Jefferson’s freethought legacy.

Think : A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

Think : A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
Amazon

Here at last is a coherent, unintimidating introduction to the challenging and fascinating landscape of Western philosophy. Written expressly for “anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them,” Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major […]

There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument

There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument
Amazon

Book Description In Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment, Mary is confined to a black-and-white room and educated through black-and-white books and lectures on a black-and-white television. In this way, she learns everything there is to know about the physical world. If physicalism–the doctrine that everything is physical–is true, then Mary seems to know all there […]

The Woman’s Bible

The Woman’s Bible
Amazon

American suffragist and feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was also and outspoken critic of the Bible because of the many injustices against women in the scriptures. The 1870 revision of the Authorized English Version of the Bible by an all-male committee of the Church of England prompted Stanton to compile the works of many prominent […]

The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus

The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus
Amazon

Book Description From the Preface: Meanwhile we may reflect with comfort on the words of Dupuis: “There are large numbers of men so perversely minded that they will believe everything except what is recommended by sound intelligence and reason, and shrink from philosophy as the hydrophobic shrinks from water. These people will not read us, […]

The Whole Shebang

The Whole Shebang
Amazon

Plenty of books try to explain the origin of the universe, but despite the ascendance of the Big Bang theory, numerous details of that theory remain in flux as new observations are made and new hypotheses formed (and then confirmed or rejected). Timothy Ferris’s The Whole Shebang is an up-to-date account of the various mechanisms […]

The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory
Amazon

‘Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: “Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s […]

The War Prayer

The War Prayer
Amazon

Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town’s young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory […]

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Amazon

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism contains Rand’s writings on ethics and political theory. The essay “The Objectivist Ethics” contains her most definitive statement concerning the metaphysical foundation of her ethical system. “The Ethics of Emergencies” and “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests” supplement and elaborates upon points made in this essay. In […]

The View from Nowhere

The View from Nowhere
Amazon

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel’s words, “nowhere in particular”. At the same time, each of us is a particular […]

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Amazon

Book Description Carl Sagan’s prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of fundamentalism and the hope-filled potential of the next great development in human spirituality. Carl Sagan is considered one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. His remarkable ability to explain science in terms easily understandable to the layman in bestselling books such as […]

The Vanquished Gods: Science, Religion, and the Nature of Belief

The Vanquished Gods: Science, Religion, and the Nature of Belief
Amazon

The twentieth century brought about a dramatic change in our conception of reality. Advances in the natural sciences radically altered our understanding of human existence and the universe; biblical scholarship demystified the Bible; and scientific inquiry has superseded biblical and church authority. Despite these dramatic developments, the public seems largely unaware of the radical conceptual […]

The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything

The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything
Amazon

Some books have a hard time living up to their titles, but The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything does just fine. Physicist and writer Richard Morris seeks to explain the current state of knowledge in cosmology and subatomic physics; as if that weren’t enough, he goes on to give us his take on how […]

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide
Amazon

It’s safe to say that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest science fiction novels ever written. Adams spoofs many core science fiction tropes: space travel, aliens, interstellar war–stripping away all sense of wonder and repainting them as commonplace, even silly. This omnibus edition begins with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the […]

The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy

The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy
Amazon

While attempting to bring order and structure to the history of philosophy, professionals in modern universities have apparently lost sight of what philosophy really is. So says Matthew Stewart, who has discovered that in the professors’ well-intended pursuit of the truth and knowledge, this area of thought has been dissected, organized into a series of […]